Who Belongs in a City

Underneath every shiny new megacity, there's often a story of communities displaced. In this moving, poetic talk, OluTimehin Adegbeye details how government land grabs are destroying the lives of thousands who live in the coastal communities of Lagos, Nigeria, to make way for a "new Dubai." She compels us to hold our governments and ourselves accountable for keeping our cities safe for everyone. "The only cities worth building, indeed the only futures worth dreaming of, are those that include all of us, no matter who we are or how we make homes for ourselves," she says.

53 percent of Californians want to leave the state, according to new survey

53 percent of Californians want to leave the state, according to new survey

Alix Martichoux, SFGATE | on February 13, 2019



Photo: Paul Sakuma

A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. A new survey shows more than half of Californians are considering leaving the state.


Dreaming of greener (read: cheaper) pastures? You're not alone.

According to a new survey by Edelman Intelligence, 53 percent of Californians are considering moving out of state due to the high cost of living. Millennials are even more likely to flee the Golden State — 63 percent of them said they want to.


Bay Area residents surveyed were especially sensitive to affordability issues, and it's no surprise. The median home value in San Francisco is $1.37 million, according to Zillow, and $1.09 million in San Jose. In Edelman's survey, 76 percent of Bay Area residents say they consider cost and availability of housing to be a serious issue.


ALSO: It's not just people fleeing the Bay Area — these businesses are leaving, too

Sixty-two percent also call homelessness a very serious issue for California.

It appears the housing and homelessness crises have led to a pessimistic outlook: 62 percent of those surveyed say the best days of living in California are behind them.

The trend is backed up by much of SFGATE's past reporting. We've spoken with people who've left California for the Pacific Northwest, Texas and Denver — all popular destinations for Bay Area ex-pats. Nearly everyone we talked to cites the high cost of living as the primary reason they left. Others were looking for a slower pace of life, lower taxes, less traffic and more time with family.

We Don't Need your Facilitation! Leave us alone!

Transit Induced Gentrification

Efforts to build housing around transit threaten to price out those most dependent on bus and rail

A San Diego Metropolitan Transit System trolley stops at the corner of Park Boulevard and Market Street in the East Village, where expensive apartment buildings and condominiums stand in stark contrast to the neighborhood's economically challenged residents. (Howard Lipin / San Diego Union-Tribune)
Joshua Emerson SmithContact Reporter



On his way to a doctor’s appointment, Steve Schneider sits at a bus stop in North Park on Tuesday afternoon surrounded by trendy coffee shops, tattoo parlors and mustachioed hipsters sipping craft beer.

The 68-year-old has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years, but in just the last four, he’s seen his rent jumped from $850 to $1,275. As an epileptic on a fixed income, he cannot drive and has recently started to fear he may have to move and lose access to transit.

“I get anxious about it, especially last year when my rent went up, and I thought ‘What am I going to do?’” he said. “That’s when I decided to get rid of my cell phone and go on the food stamps.”

Schneider’s situation could be part of an emerging new trend of bus and rail riders priced out of their communities by the very policies designed to boost transit ridership.


Lawmakers, academics and urban planners from Southern California to Sacramento have long called for building denser housing around transit stops. The idea is to design neighborhoods that encourage people to ditch their car commutes — simultaneously fighting climate change while trying to address the state’s historic housing crisis.

However, efforts to inspire construction along rail and bus lines, coupled with a severe shortage of housing, have brought opulent apartment buildings and condominiums into economically challenged neighborhoods. As young professionals flock to the new housing, moderate- to low-income tenants in urban areas from San Diego to Sacramento are now facing displacement.


Tenants’ rights groups, especially in Southern California, say the trend is already playing out in many communities with serious consequences.The greatest risk is the places that are already showing signs of gentrification. There’s already value in those neighborhoods and the private market has seen.— Miriam Zuk, director of the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley


“You’re seeing families pushed further from transit,” said Laura Raymond, campaign director for Alliance for Community Transit in Los Angeles. “Around the urban core, we still have a lot of low-income families living next to transit-rich areas. They don’t have cars. When those areas are gentrifying, they’re moving out, and it becomes a lot more difficult to access their jobs.”

In the last five years, there were about 400 multifamily buildings completed or under construction within a half mile of a transit stop in the metropolitan areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento and the Bay Area, according to data from real estate tracker CoStar.

While the median family income in those neighborhoods was on average less than $64,000 a year, the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment was more than $3,500 a month, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune analysis of Census and Costar data.

And about one in five of those projects are in areas where the median household income is less than $30,000, where the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment is still more than $3,300.

Concerns have become so pronounced, in fact, that academics have given the phenomenon a name: “transit-induced gentrification.”

“Being within a half mile of a rail station, we did see higher rates of gentrification in those neighborhoods,” said Miriam Zuk, director of the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley, who has studied the phenomenon.

“The greatest risk is the places that are already showing signs of gentrification,” she added. “There’s already value in those neighborhoods and the private market has seen that.”

Zuk participated in a report prepared last year for the California Air Resources Board by UC Berkeley and UCLA that tracked demographic shifts around rail transportation in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

The report found that “transit proximity has a significant impact on the stability of the surrounding neighborhood, leading to increases in housing costs that change the composition of the area, including the loss of low-income households.”

A San Diego Metropolitan Transit System bus travels along Market Street at 13th Street near the 13th and Market apartments in East Village, where rent for a two-bedroom apartment is more than 2,800 a month. (Howard Lipin / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Will building more housing solve the problem?

While the idea that rising housing costs are overhauling the face of many neighborhoods around the state and country, what to do about it, especially in transit-rich areas, has become a hot-button issue in California.

Experts agree that the state’s skyrocketing rents and home prices are largely the result of a massive housing deficit.

In the last decade, the state has added an average of roughly 80,000 new homes annually, far short of the roughly 180,000 needed every year to keep pace with growth, according to a recent report from the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

However, to actually lower the cost of housing, the state would need to add roughly 2.5 million new units by 2025, or roughly 357,000 a year, according to a recent analysis from the University of Southern California.

Perhaps not surprisingly, nobody seems quicker to point out the need for a massive infusion of new workforce housing than the construction industry.

“You can demand transit-oriented development all day long, but it’s not going to house the people that need housing in those areas,” said Borre Winckel, president and CEO of the Building Industry Association of San Diego County. “I’ve never seen this much demand for the middle market. There’s no parallel in history. This is very scary, uncharted territory, and people are not taking this seriously.”

Coalitions of upwardly mobile professionals have formed in just the last year or so to demand lawmakers from city hall to Sacramento embrace policies to inspire new-home construction. These groups have embraced the notion that just dramatically increasing housing supply will bring down the price of homeownership as well as renting across all income levels.

Most notably the newly formed nonprofit California YIMBY — which stands for “yes in my backyard,” a play on the commonly used acronym NIMBY or “not in my backyard” — sponsored a bill in the state Legislature this year that would have bulldozed zoning requirements for density and parking up to a half mile from major transit stops all around the state.

Many academics supported the move enthusiastically.

“What’s really contributing to gentrification is the lack of new housing being built in general regardless of location,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley School of Law. “If you don’t build new homes for these newcomers, they’re going to buy up existing homes and start gentrifying neighborhoods.”

However, a recent effort by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to loosen zoning regulations and encourage more construction around transit ran into opposition, from homeowners to local elected officials to even tenants’ rights organizations.


Affluent communities have routinely expressed concerns about new housing bringing increased traffic and undermining local aesthetics. More recently, lower-income renters have started demanding policies to prevent renters from being shunted aside in the rush to build housing for middle-class families.

After garnering national attention, Wiener saw his proposal, SB 827, to preempt local zoning rules around transit abruptly killed in its first committee hearing.

The death blow came, somewhat surprisingly, with opposition from rights groups for low-income tenants, such as Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, known as SAJE.

“My group really believe strongly in increased density along transit lines,” said Executive Director Cynthia Strathmann. “We just want to make sure that a big component of that is affordable.”

While Wiener and California YIMBY readily included a number of amendments at the behest of the fair-housing groups, it wasn’t enough to win their support. Backers of the bill are expected to renew their efforts and attempt to build a broader coalition next year.

Transit riders such Richard Krukowski aren’t holding their breath. The 51-year-old survives on disability payments and lives in a studio apartment in San Diego’s rapidly gentrifying East Village. He said he’s looking for a cheaper place to live on the bus line, but hasn’t had much luck.

“Clearly everybody’s concerned,” he said of all his friends in the area, “but pretty much everyone knows how it’s going to go. You’re not going to beat the developers and the big bucks.”

Can government policies ensure affordable housing for all?

Campaigns to bring down the cost of housing are threatening to pit the middle-class residents against the renters.

Right now, a developer who includes affordable housing in a project can get bonuses through the state and local government. Incentives include everything from faster permitting to being able to construct more units within a single building to relaxed parking requirements.

However, many advocates would like to see lawmakers take a more heavy-handed approach, requiring projects around transit stops to include a designated number of affordable units, using what are known as inclusionary zoning ordinances.

Such policies can be effective but they’re not without their consequences, said Casey Dawkins, a researcher with the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland.

“What tends to happen is you get affordable lower-income housing and you get more expensive unrestricted housing, and it’s harder to fill the middle and achieve moderate income affordability,” he said.

Some neighborhoods would like to see such zoning restrictions aimed at middle-income residents as well.

Under pressure from local residents, the city of San Diego has repeatedly stalled on plans to allow for greater density around planned transit stations that will serve the Mid-Coast Trolley extension, which is under construction from downtown to University City. Such proposals have routinely drawn huge crowds of angry homeowners from Bay Park, Linda Vista and Clairemont.

Recently, however, neighborhood residents have shifted from outright opposition to higher-density development to ensuring that whatever gets built is affordable for working-class people in the immediate area.

“What the community wants is workforce housing, and what the proposals are on the table from the land owners are luxury rentals with ocean views,” said James LaMattery, spokesperson for a group called Raise the Balloon, formed to oppose a city proposal to raise the building height limit in Bay Ho from 30 feet to 60 feet. “The city wants to rezone for more housing but they don’t want to guarantee the appropriate housing.”

LaMattery and others have suggested that developers who build workforce housing should get a break on inclusionary fees, which subsidized housing for the poor.

Therein lies the rub: In the decade or more it could take to erase California’s housing backlog, government policies aimed at controlling costs may result in winners and losers split along economic lines.

“Let’s be frank, there’s sometimes a blindness from the YIMBY crowd about the interests of the low-income tenant community and communities of color,” said Colin Parent, executive director of Circulate San Diego and member of a new local Democratic Party club YIMBY Democrats. “It just doesn’t occur to them that these displacement issues are big problems.”

In the meantime, efforts to enact rent controls are popping up around the state. For example, in National City — where 70 percent of the population are tenants — a signature drive is underway to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent in the city.

Statewide, tenants’ rights advocates have spearheaded a repeal of a decades-old law known as the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which prohibits cities from imposing rent control on single-family homes, condominiums, as well as any apartment buildings built after 1995.

Supporters are closing in on the 550,000 signatures they need to qualify a measure for the November ballot.

Landlords and developers strongly oppose lifting the restrictions, saying that rent control will only exacerbate the housing crisis. Experts and even progressive economists have agreed.

“It will absolutely interfere with new construction, and that’s the biggest fear we have,” said Debra Carlton, senior vice president of public affairs for the California Apartment Association. “If you can’t make that thing pencil it’s not going to happen in cities with strict rent control. It’s a great way to slow development.”

Carlton added that developers and even large corporate landlords aren’t making huge profits off the current situation.

“Despite what people might think the margins are very slim, because of the cost of land,” she said. “Even those high-end towers have staff costs, attorney costs, not to mention what it cost to buy and build it.”

Will affluent residents ever embrace public transit?

The overwhelming majority of transit riders are people of limited means.

In San Diego, for example, 84 percent of transit riders come from households that make less than $60,000 a year, according to data from the San Diego Association of Governments. And roughly 80 percent of riders are dependent on transit as their primary means of transportation.

A study in January from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies found that ridership of public transportation in Southern California had dipped as car ownership, especially among lower-income residents, increased.

After working her full-time job at a local coffee house in North Park, Wendy Islas drives with her husband to their home in Mexico, where they moved to save on rent. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Wendy Islas, for example, moved with her husband to Rosarito in January to avoid the rising cost of rent in her La Mesa neighborhood. For her it made more sense to trade a bus commute to the North Park job where she works for a more than hour-long drive by car.


“We’re trying to save money to buy a house, but if we kept living in San Diego it would be impossible,” said the 30-year-old San Diego native. “It’s tough right now because we have to wake up at the crack of dawn.”

An improving economy and cheap gas likely fueled the trend in falling transit ridership. But even as prices at the pump rise, some fear displacement of transit’s core patrons will continue to exacerbate challenges for systems around the state.

Even some of transit-oriented development’s biggest supporters have recognized the irony of the situation.

“The real story is those people that move into the high-density areas take Uber and Lyft not buses,” said architect-developer Jonathan Segal. “That’s the irony.”

Segal is no stranger to the changing dynamics of urban neighborhoods. He has built several critically lauded projects in North Park and Little Italy focused on invigorating street life.

He said that while newly arrived residents in these area may not be taking transit, he’s not giving up on his vision, which he believes still encourages people to drive less.

“Because it’s in a dense corridor, all the amenities come with that, like bars, coffee shops, the drycleaners,” Segal said. “So you don’t have to drive to Fashion Valley to see a movie.”

He might be right.

Findings from the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA have found no correlation between displacing transit riders and higher rates of overall driving in a region.

According to the report there is “little evidence that (vehicle miles traveled) would be affected by displacement unless it is accompanied by a loss of population near transit.”

The study found that lower-income residents drive less than more affluent households regardless of how close they are to transit, while higher-income residents tend to use their cars more infrequently the closer they are to a rail station.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that those residents are commuting to work using bus or rail systems.

Transit-rich San Francisco is the exception, with slightly more people biking, walking and taking transit to work than driving, according to Census data. But in San Diego County, for example, 85 percent of workers 16 years and older still drive to their job.

Photos show how Seattle’s favorite businesses vanished after Amazon showed up — and it could be an omen for the HQ2 city

Photos show how Seattle’s favorite businesses vanished after Amazon showed up — and it could be an omen for the HQ2 city

Construction in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, the home of Amazon's headquarters.Harrison Jacobs/Business InsiderIn the past two decades, Amazon has grown from a startup birthed in Jeff Bezo's garage into one of the world's largest tech companies.



In the late 1990s, the online-retail giant planted its first headquarters in Seattle, Washington, where it now employs 40,000 people and spans 8.1 million square feet.

Amazon's presence has fundamentally changed the city, according to Cynthia Brothers, a 36-year-old Seattle native. In recent years, she has noticed that coffee shops, grocers, restaurants, and bars beloved by locals are increasingly shutting down to make way for upscale redevelopments.

Brothers — and many urbanism experts— argue that Amazon's rise has contributed to the closure of independent retailers, along with rising housing prices, increased traffic, and constant construction.

Seattle's gentrifying landscape inspired Brothers to launch Vanishing Seattle, an Instagram account that documents longstanding businesses that have shuttered. The photo project reveals a potential future for the city Amazon picks to house its new headquarters, called HQ2.

Take a look below.
View As: One Page Slides

Brothers began Vanishing Seattle in 2016.
eighth_generation/Instagram

Her first post was a video of a drag queen named Atasha, who performed Dream Girls’ “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” on the closing night of Inay’s, a longstanding restaurant and bar.







Brothers describes Inay's as a popular institution that served as a hub for Seattle's Asian-American and LGBT communities.


Inay’s closed due to a rent increase — something that has become increasingly common as Amazon becomes bigger in the city.
A man stands on a plaza on the Amazon campus, Thursday, April 27, 2017, in downtown Seattle. AP

Since 2000, the area has added 99,000 new jobs, with 30% of them in tech, contributing to a construction boom. As Seattle’s largest property taxpayer and private employer, Amazon has continued to spur an influx of high-skilled tech workers.
A street in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, the home of Amazon's headquarters. Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider


Source: The Seattle Times (1 and 2)


Other startups have come to Seattle to ride out the tech boom.
A street in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, the home of Amazon's headquarters. Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

The city’s building stock has struggled to keep up with demand, contributing to higher rent prices. As a result, some longtime residents and businesses in lower-income neighborhoods have been driven out.
Viva The Sunlight Cafe, oldest vegetarian restaurant in Seattle. crosscut_news/Instagran


While the connection between gentrification and small-business turnover is complicated, a number of independent retailers are under pressure from soaring rents in Seattle, Brothers said.


Near Amazon’s headquarters in South Lake Union (a neighborhood called "Amazonia" by locals), the Hurricane Cafe was recently bought and demolished by Amazon. The company plans to build two office towers in its place.
Greenlake, a closed bar in Seattle. Vanishing Seattle

Nearby, a 50-year-old bar called 13 Coins closed on January 1 to make way for redevelopment. A few weeks prior, the Two Bells Tavern met the same fate.
Two Bells Tavern, a closed bar in Seattle. Vanishing Seattle


Two Bells' closure "hit people hard," Brother said.


Brothers says displacement is happening not just in Amazonia, but in neighborhoods across Seattle.
Antiques at Pike Place, a shuttered antique shop in Seattle. Vanishing Seattle

In Central Area, a half-dozen primarily black-and-immigrant-owned businesses served as deep-rooted community gathering spots.
Vintage graffiti on a new-demolished building in Seattle. Skkyphoenix/Instagram


The retail complex, called Promenade 23, centered around the Red Apple grocery store.
Big Apple, a closed supermarket at the now-defunct Promenade 23 in Seattle. Vanishing Seattle

But in 2017, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate bought the property to turn it into a 530-unit residential tower. Here's a rendering of what the development will look like:
Vulcan Real Estate and Studio 216


There’s reason to believe that redevelopment could threaten small businesses in the chosen HQ2 city, too.
Zanadu, a shuttered comic store in Seattle. Vanishing Seattle


Real estate website Apartment List recently looked at HQ2's potential impact on 15 North American cities, and found that it could raise rent prices by up to 2% annually.

According to the report, the HQ2 metro areas with the highest rent increases would include Raleigh, North Carolina (1.5% to 2% annually) and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1.2% to 1.6%).

As a Seattle native, Brothers fears that the city will continue to lose its staple institutions.
M & L Records and Models, a family-owned hobby shop in Seattle. daniellekuhlmann/Instagram


Referring to Amazon’s campus, she said the company “constructed an artificial neighborhood."
The Felix Building in Seattle. Vanishing Seattle


"People don't hang out after work or on the weekend. And what's there now? A West Elm and fitness club that costs $200 month. It's a cultural wasteland," she said.

“I worry about where the counterculture is going to go,” Brothers said. “Because the counterculture was Seattle’s culture. We need to create a city that’s not just about tech, convenience, consumption, and disruption.”

San Fran City Planner: End Free market in Housing/Let Government Set Rental Rates/Housing Prices—AND Who Can Live in San Fran

San Fran City Planner: End Free market in Housing/Let Government Set Rental Rates/Housing Prices—AND Who Can Live in San Fran

December 13, 2016 By Stephen Frank 2 Comments



Did you believe the job of a “city planner” was to promote the free market, to allow residents to live where they want and can afford? If so, you are deadly wrong and the San Fran City Planning must have interned in Russia or other totalitarian State, not in a free nation.

“Rahaim said in the letter that his department will address the gentrification concerns by imposing a new set of special development and land use rules in the Mission as well as also other vulnerable neighborhoods, like South of Market and the Tenderloin.

“We know that there is simply not enough housing regionally or in San Francisco to meet our needs. We know that producing housing at all income levels is critical,” Rahaim wrote. “We also know that it will take a broad set of smart, bold strategies to address the totality of the causes and effects of high housing costs and displacement.”

The concerns over gentrification also come as city officials have declared homelessness a crisis. Federal officials last month said the region’s strong real estate market is a reason why homelessness increased in West Coast cities like San Francisco but declined overall throughout the nation by 14 percent since 2010.

How well does central planning work in San Fran? While the rest of the nation had a decline in homelessness is 14%, San Fran increased. This City Planner wants to make it worse—but will say it is the “government plan”. The Soviet Union is dead, San Fran is the new version.


SF Planning director calls gentrification ‘undeniable, and of serious concern’

by Joshua Sabatini, SF Examiner,12/12/16

The head of the Planning Department acknowledged in a letter Friday the severity of gentrification occurring in San Francisco amid the years-long development boom while also outlining measures underway to address it.

“The reality of displacement and gentrification across all of San Francisco — and the entire region — is undeniable, and of serious concern,” Planning Director John Rahaim wrote in a Dec. 9 letter to the Board of Supervisors.

The letter was in response to the board opposing last month a major residential development in the Mission amid community opposition centered on gentrification.

The board’s vote also created uncertainty for other proposed developments in the Mission District, seen as ground zero for the impacts of the technology boom, as well as projects planned for other communities.

Rahaim said in the letter that his department will address the gentrification concerns by imposing a new set of special development and land use rules in the Mission as well as also other vulnerable neighborhoods, like South of Market and the Tenderloin.

“We know that there is simply not enough housing regionally or in San Francisco to meet our needs. We know that producing housing at all income levels is critical,” Rahaim wrote. “We also know that it will take a broad set of smart, bold strategies to address the totality of the causes and effects of high housing costs and displacement.”

The concerns over gentrification also come as city officials have declared homelessness a crisis. Federal officials last month said the region’s strong real estate market is a reason why homelessness increased in West Coast cities like San Francisco but declined overall throughout the nation by 14 percent since 2010.

Rahaim said that the Planning Department is specifically addressing the concerns of gentrification in the Mission through the development of Mission Action Plan 2020, which he said would result in 1,000 affordable housing units in the Mission, and through the interim land use controls currently in place before that plan is finalized next year.



“We believe that MAP 2020 represents a national model for how urban neighborhoods might address issues of gentrification and displacement,” he said.

Since the technology boom began in 2010, encouraged by the tech-friendly policies of Mayor Ed Lee, gentrification has been at the heart of contentious political debates on a myriad of issues, including the “Google Bus,” transportation services like Uber and Lyft, Airbnb regulations, affordable housing requirements and eviction protections.

While San Francisco has greatly transformed during the past several years and many have left The City for more affordable locales, the debate around gentrification continues to unfold in community meetings and at City Hall.

Rahaim’s letter was prompted by the Board of Supervisors’ Nov. 15 vote to oppose a 159-unit development, of which 39 units would be affordable, at 1515 S. Van Ness Ave. in the Mission by Lennar Multifamily Communities. The board opposed the development by upholding an environmental review appeal filed under the California Environmental Quality Act.

The appeal was filed by the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District’s Executive Director Erick Arguello and argued the review was flawed by failing to address the impacts of gentrification, an argument that has been made previously without success for other projects.

The Nov. 15 vote was particularly charged. Arguello’s attorney Scott Weaver referred to how Mission gentrification had ushered in the era of the $6 croissant, the $100-per-person meal or the $350 handbag for sale on Valencia Street.

“The gentrification we’ve seen on Valencia and on Mission [streets] is the beginning. What is to come is an overwhelming economic force that will change the face of the Mission and of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District,” Weaver said at the time.

It was the comments of Sonja Trauss, founder of pro-development group San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation, that backfired and seemed to hand opponents a win when she likened the Mission advocates’ opposition to the project to politics akin to President-elect Donald Trump.

“I’ve always been disturbed by nativism in San Francisco,” Trauss said at the time. “And when you come here to the Board of Supervisors and say that you don’t want new, different people in your neighborhood you’re exactly the same as Americans all over the country that don’t want immigrants.”

Supervisor David Campos, who represents the Mission, called out Trauss’ comments specifically when saying he was planning to reject the appeal but changed his mind.

The Calle 24 Latino Cultural District is a 14-block area, wherein the project is proposed, created by The City in 2014 to officially acknowledge the Latino legacy in the area and support regulations to protect it.

Many of the same opponents of the Lennar project also backed a previously proposed moratorium on market-rate housing for the Mission neighborhood.

In 2015 Campos proposed the moratorium to create a “pause” of development of market-rate units – the proposal would have allowed 100 percent affordable housing development – to buy some time to create a long-term plan to combat gentrification.

The moratorium proposal inspired countless debates around supply and demand in the housing market. After the board failed to approve the moratorium, it was subsequently placed on the ballot and rejected by voters.

Moratorium opponents argued that The City needs housing of all income levels and that market-rate development is a vital funding source for affordable housing. Developers are required to include a percentage of units onsite or pay in-lieu fees to The City, which then uses them to fund affordable housing projects.

In his letter, Rahaim cites several statistics to illustrate socio-economic challenges residents face.
“In 2013, 45 percent of renters paid more than 30 percent of their income for rent; that means that nearly half of renters in San Francisco are rent burdened,” the letter reads. “Evictions are taking place across The City, with the Mission, Richmond, Sunset, Excelsior, Tenderloin, and Lakeshore neighborhoods having the highest eviction notices in 2015 and 2016. The Latino population in the Mission had declined to 39 percent in 2014, down from 50 percent in 2000.”

Rahaim also vowed in the letter to announce in spring 2017 “how we undertake a broader socio-economic analysis of displacement, gentrification and growth with a focus on equity” that he said currently isn’t covered under the California Environmental Quality Act.

It remains to be seen whether Rahaim’s letter will prompt the board to reverse its decision on the 1515 S. Van Ness Avenue development.

At the time of the vote, Supervisor Malia Cohen said The City needs “a sea change” on how it handles development. “Development should not be about displacing people,” Cohen had said.

Mission advocates have been working with the Planning Department and other city agencies for more than a year to develop anti-gentrification plans like MAP 2020.

“We are encouraged by the director’s public acknowledgement of the gentrification problem facing the Mission and other neighborhoods of color,” Weaver told the San Francisco Examiner on Monday. “The political will to take the steps necessary to address this problem now lies squarely with the Board of Supervisors and the mayor.”

Fuller House In The Real San Francisco

Paved with Good Intentions

Displacement and Real Estate Profits

55 Dolores Street, San Francisco - Erin Thompson, Compass Real Estate from Circle Visions on Vimeo.

70 Acres in Chicago- What happened when low income housing was replaced with mixed income.

A Requiem for Chicago's Cabrini Green Housing Projects

“70 Acres in Chicago” chronicles what happened when the city tore down the Cabrini Green projects to replace them with mixed-income housing.

BRENTIN MOCK


Hellen Shiller


Ronit Bezalel has spent 20 years filming the brick-by-brick dismantling of the Cabrini Green public housing projects in Chicago for her recently released documentary 70 Acres in Chicago. The dwellings figure prominently—and sometimes notoriously—in the American imagination, largely through its portrayal in TV shows like “Good Times” and movies like Candyman and Cooley High. They were built in the early 1940s in an area near downtown Chicago that had been a neighborhood mostly composed of Italian families. By the 1960s, it had become a predominantly black community, with nearly 15,000 families living in Cabrini’s mostly high-rise apartment buildings.

The city decided to replace Cabrini Green with mixed-income housing under the federal Hope VI program in the early 1990s. Bezalel began documenting Cabrini’s destruction in 1995, the year the first buildings were torn down. Much of her 55-minute documentary focuses on what has happened to the families displaced for this mixed-income experiment. The film also documents the ways in which Cabrini families spoke out and fought against the city’s plans to tear down their homes.

In one scene, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is seen speaking at a 1997 press conference, where he promises that “every family that wants to stay in this community will stay in this community.” It’s a familiar refrain for urban renewal compacts, and one that turned out to be dead wrong in Chicago. Mark Pratt, a main character in Bezalel’s film, was a Cabrini resident at the time of Daley’s conference. But 20 years later, with all 70 acres of the housing projects now officially wiped away and replaced with new rowhouses, Pratt was not able to return to live to the community.
Former Cabrini Green resident Mark Pratt at the Cabrini rowhouses (Photo: Cristina Rutter)

Bezalel spoke to CityLab about her documentary and what she learned about Chicago, racism, and displacement over the film’s 20-year production process.

Whenever there’s a discussion about displacement, there’s usually an underlying issue of racial segregation. Was it difficult reconciling the legacy of segregation with the desires of black families to remain in a segregated environment?

It isn't difficult to reconcile these two issues, because I don’t think they're different. Segregation in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. People self-segregate. We seek comfort in the familiar. I think it's more about whether a community has the agency to decide where and how they shall live. It's about who has the right to the city.

Historically, African-American families in Chicago were not granted the agency to move where they wanted. Their mobility was threatened by economic, legal, and event violent means. You had redlining and restrictive covenants. Firebombs were thrown in people’s windows. Segregation was shaped by the powers that be, arising from white privilege and a lack of respect for people of color.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Cabrini started being demolished, and residents fought to stay in their community. This was about coming together in unity, strength, and with agency. Perhaps one can view this as segregation as a conscious choice, which is quite different than segregation that is forced upon a community.

What do you think about urban design and planning theories that characterize high-rise buildings themselves as dysfunctional?

I don't think there is anything inherently dysfunctional about high-rises. If there was a flaw in [these] high-rises, it was an economic flaw. High-rises are quite expensive to maintain. In Cabrini, you had an elevator that frequently broke down and was expensive to fix. This, coupled with the financial mismanagement of the Chicago Housing Authority, led to a situation where the high-rises were run down, which became a problem.

I recognize that there are different schools of thought on this. There’s a school that says the high rise is just bad. Bradford Hunt, in his book Blueprint for Disaster writes about how the high-rises were shoddily made. So you have that argument. And then also there’s the argument that it’s not the high-rises at all. I feel that the conditions of the high-rises were pretty bad, but I don’t feel it was necessarily the design, per se. I think it was just general neglect overall. I don’t feel that if we all had low-rises—which is what is being built there now—it would cure the problems. What’s interesting is that some of the new homes being built there now are high-rises. Parkside, which is on Cabrini Green land, is a high-rise.

We look at design to escape whats going on underneath, the inequalities underneath. And that becomes used as a veil or a shield.

What do you think of the Moving to Opportunity research and recent court decisions concerning moving poor families to wealthier neighborhoods?

What I can say is that there needs to be more dialogue about race and class issues when we move poor families to wealthier neighborhoods. There need to be forums where we can come together in a safe way to discuss the issues. Simply displacing people and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Developer Peter and Jackie Holsten are doing this at the Parkside of Old Town mixed-income community. Parkside is the mixed-income community built on Cabrini land. So, the Holstens brought in a performance company called The Kaleidoscope Group. Former Cabrini residents, renters and home owners wrote about incidences in the community that happened to them. This group then acted it out, in a way that made it safe and not pointing fingers at anyone, and then there was a dialogue. This is healing, this is addressing issues of race and class. Just plopping people down beside each other and hoping for the best doesn't work without this social lubricant.

People ask me why I made this film, and what my interest in race and class is. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, we were bused to a black school in Wilmington, Delaware. And so, we’re these white kids plopped into a black school where there was no discussion of race in the curriculum. It was just, ‘Here you are now. Now you’re going to get along and be friends and everything is going to be wonderful.’ Meanwhile, some of the white teachers were spreading racist behaviors, and some of the black students had to deal with their community being invaded and fractured.

Were there any ideas you had going into the film that you shifted perspective on during the filmmaking process?

I went into the film with a clear agenda that tearing down homes was bad. I still feel that way, but I evolved as a person and filmmaker to see the shades of grey. It is complicated. Was it really horrific? Sure. Was it wonderful? Yeah. Should they tear down the buildings? No. I think I got a lot more real and willing to engage with the issues on a more serious level, to the point that I realized I don’t have the answers. I’m certainly not a developer, designer, or any of that. I’m more of just a storyteller.

Overall, what kept me at Cabrini was a sense of connection and a sense of community there. There really is an injustice in the erasure of an entire community, and not valuing that community, and that just felt wrong to me.

What should be the audience’s takeaway? That this is complicated, or that there was a real injustice here?

I don’t know if it’s either-or. My activism is through storytelling, and the takeaway would be for people who know nothing about Cabrini to have a better sense of what it was. And to preserve this, since the physical structure is gone, on video or digitally so that their stories aren’t forgotten. Also for people to connect the dots when they see the same thing happen in their community.

San Francisco "Send them to Marin!"

Urban Habitat's Bob Allen speaks at Bay Guardian conference June 12, 2013. His solution to displacement of African Americans and Latinos in San Francisco is to force more urban growth in suburban and rural counties like Marin, Sonoma and Napa. He completely misses the irony that his "solution" is to for other communities to deal with it. He claims that community's who call for "local control" are racist, segregationists. Because of this, no money from HUD or MTC should be given unless a growth policy is adapted. A better solution is a regional government which would eliminate local control. He also implies that Marin is filled with Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists. Urban Habitat receives its funding through public and private donations and income from its litigation. Allen utterly ignores the plight of ethnic communities. Don't they need local control too? Wouldn't "local control" allow for communities of color to stay intact? In Chinatown, the Mission, Hunters Point communities suffer while the social engineers cause the disruption and displacement of thousands.

We are being forced from our homes due to Plan Bay Area

Gentrification

Gentrification from Word of the Day on Vimeo.

"You are forcing us from our home because of Plan Bay Area"

Displacement of Thousands will occur all over the Bay Area in Priority Development Areas.  In Marin, the Highway 101 Priority Development area for urbanization includes all land within 1//2 mile of Highway 101 from Sausalito to Novato Narrows.  This include tens of thousands of families who may be subject to displacement due to urban development.

Gentrification: Can Portland give displaced residents a path back?

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North Williams Avenue along with North Vancouver Avenue (shown here), once home to black businesses and clubs, are now the site of construction cranes and trendy restaurants. Portland is hoping to make amends and invest tens of millions in housing projects in the inner city to combat displacement of residents and help bring people back to the area who've since moved. Kristyna Wentz-Graff / Staff

Kristyna Wentz-Graff | The Oregonian/OregonLive

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By Andrew Theen | The Oregonian/OregonLive 
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on December 23, 2015 at 5:02 AM, updated December 23, 2015 at 9:44 PM

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PORTLAND CITY HALL

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At least twice a month, Kijana Winchester takes a detour past her childhood home on the drive from her apartment in east Portland to her job at Jefferson High School.

The memories flood back: Summer sleepovers on the big front porch. Parties with pizza and hotdogs. Snaking through alleys with her four siblings on the 15-minute walk to school at Jefferson.

Jefferson and the surrounding North Portland neighborhood remain close to her heart. But today, the 42-year-old lives a half-hour away in the Wilkes neighborhood that straddles Interstate 84 east of Glendoveer Golf Course.

If she could afford to, Winchester says: "I would move back tomorrow."

Now she and hundreds more may get a chance to return.

Portland officials, well aware that African Americans such as Winchester have been priced out or pushed out of their historic neighborhoods in inner North and Northeast Portland, are embarking on an unprecedented plan to open a narrow path back.

City officials plan to use urban renewal – the same tool blamed for decades of displacement – to fuel a "right of return." At least $96 million will be used over 10 years to build apartments, preserve other buildings, help families stay in their homes and help others buy back into the 3,990-acre Interstate Corridor urban renewal area of North and Northeast Portland.

The vision includes a preference policy, inspired by a New York City program, to put both current residents barely holding onto their apartment and former residents at the front of the line for subsidized apartments and down-payment assistance.

Read more

Here's a breakdown of Portland's plansfor North and Northeast Portland.

No one pretends the program can make up for decades of displacement, which includes the destruction of entire neighborhoods for Emanuel Hospital (now Legacy Emanuel Medical Center) and the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. From 2000 to 2014 alone, 8,900 African Americans moved out of inner North and Northeast as gentrification rolled through, U.S. Census Bureau figures show.

The money is "a long way from the amount that would make a difference," said Tony Hopson Sr., founder of North Portland's Self Enhancement Inc., a school and social-service center that serves mostly black families.

Still, he said, it's a start. He appreciates the outside-the-box thinking and agreed there are "thousands that would certainly move back if given the opportunity."

Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Housing Bureau, knows some think the city program is too little, too late. But he said he's open to anything that could blunt the negative effects of gentrification.

"We think the preference policy is kind of a bold idea," he said, adding: "This isn't the end of the discussion. It's really just sort of the beginning."

"Miss Kiki"

Winchester walked into Jefferson's gym just after tipoff of the first of three boys basketball games one dreary December night.

She sat in the corner behind the visitor's bench but wasn't alone for long. A security guard plopped next to her, then the wife of one of the coaches, then a pack of students. She'd begun her workday 12 hours earlier but still had energy for the kids.

For the second game, Winchester sat at the scorer's table, tallying fouls for the junior varsity squad, her hoop earrings swinging as she craned forward to catch the action.

Winchester – Kiki to her friends and "Miss Kiki" to the roughly 520 students at Jefferson – has worked as a teacher's assistant in the Portland School District since 1998.

She's been there long enough that she's now mentoring the children of childhood friends. She also works closely with special-needs kids, helping them in classes, from dance to history. Students trust her.

It's important, she said, to attend every basketball game. The boys expect it. Some of their parents might not attend games, but students know she'll be there for them.

"They always ask, 'Miss Kiki, you don't have any kids?'" Winchester said while driving around her old neighborhood. "I'm like, 'You guys are my kids. Everyone in the school.'"

But the days of having a family home nearby ended a decade ago, when her parents decided to downsize after the five kids had grown. The siblings regret it, and none lives in North Portland anymore.

"I still drive by sometimes," she said, parked outside her old home in a downpour. Why? "I'm just blessed to have the memories."

Point system

Portland officials in recent years have begun to openly acknowledge the loss to families: Yes, gentrification forced people from their homes, and, yes, the city shares some of the blame.

This month, a group of older African Americans sat in red upholstered chairs at a Maranatha Church gym in inner Northeast to hear about one proposed remedy.

As the city builds affordable units – about 180 units in three projects are in some stage of development – it will keep a waiting list. Officials will use a six-point system to rank applicants on how close they live or used to live to neighborhoods most affected by urban renewal – with land seized through condemnation or eminent domain earning the most points.

Families will rank higher than individuals, and families who had property taken by the city will rank highest of all.

The preference policy won't apply strictly to African Americans; Housing Bureau officials say they're targeting "marginalized communities with historic ties" to the area. But officials expect African Americans to score high because so many black families were displaced.

Housing officials have already identified hundreds of households – more than 180 homes were seized by Emanuel Hospital in the 1970s. An additional 100 homes or businesses were razed for the Coliseum in the late 1950s, and at least 220 homes or businesses were displaced by the Albina Community Plan revitalization project approved by the City Council in 1993.

Matthew Tschabold, the Housing Bureau's equity and policy manager, said these are all estimates that may well fall short of the actual numbers.

The plan is based, in part, on a decades-old New York City policy that sets aside half of new affordable units for a neighborhood's current residents. Wiley Norvell, deputy press secretary for Mayor Bill de Blasio, said the policy wasn't aimed at gentrification but has become an antidote nonetheless.

"As a result of this policy," Norvell said, "a New Yorker stands a greater chance of securing affordable housing in their own neighborhood if that's their choice."

"People weren't ready"

Portland's current interest in affordable housing can be traced in part to a 2013 controversy surrounding a proposed Trader Joe's on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Residents and others protested after the Portland Development Commission sold a 2-acre parcel at a steep discount to a California developer to woo the grocer. The grass-roots Portland African American Leadership Forum led the backlash, blasting both the grocery deal and decades of damage caused by urban renewal. They also emphatically called for more affordable housing.

By March 2014, Trader Joe's had retreated and Mayor Charlie Hales had convened a summit of black leaders. The city promised to spend $20 million on affordable housing in inner North and Northeast over five years.

Last August, officials including Hales and Saltzman gathered at a city lot near Irving Park to celebrate plans for an affordable-housing project there, along with already-announced plans for a new store – Natural Grocers -- on the Trader Joe's site.

In September, Hales led the City Council in declaring a housing emergency, with a pledge to spend separate money to address homelessness and other housing issues. In October, the council approved new renter protections and agreed to increase the share of urban renewal money dedicated to affordable housing from 30 percent to 45 percent.

PORTLAND, OREGON - January 30, 2014 - PAALF Director Cyreena Boston Ashby speaks before introducing the graduating members of the Leadership Academy. Emily Jan/OregonianThe Oregonian 

Cyreena Boston Ashby, who led the Portland African American Leadership Forumduring the Trader Joe's controversy, said it's been interesting to watch housing suddenly become the city's top priority two years after her group attracted death threats and hate mail for raising the issue.

"People weren't ready to listen," Boston Ashby said, "more specifically, because it was a group of black people telling them this."

Hopson agreed. "When white folks are talking about it and needing it," he said, "then something is going to get done about it."

Saltzman said the Trader Joe's dispute, rampant development on North Williams Avenue and the hot real estate market combined to turn the tide. "It kind of reached a flashpoint and got our attention, got the mayor's attention," he said.

What's next

Many questions remain.

At a recent meeting of a city task force assigned to oversee how the $20 million piece is spent, city staffers acknowledged they have a lot of work to do, including setting up City Hall oversight of the program. The plan also does nothing to address helping low-income residents in neighborhoods where gentrification could hit next.

Committee member Katrina Holland peppered staffers about the preference policy. Will it last forever? Will it expand to areas beyond North and Northeast? Those details are still undetermined.

In an interview, Saltzman said he wants to see how the policy works "but certainly it could be applicable in other areas as well."

Despite all the unknowns, Hopson said Portland's African American community is optimistic for the first time in years. City officials have built some good will with constituents used to being burned, he said.

Hales said he's aware of the distrust, especially the "very unhappy history" between inner-city residents and the Development Commission. The mayor, who's not seeking re-election in 2016, said he's determined to show the area that good things are coming. "I'm going to make damn sure that we deliver at least $20 million worth of housing benefits," he said.

The City Council will hear a detailed presentation on the preference policy in February. The first units under the plan are expected to become available in 2017.

Winchester, meanwhile, hopes she can qualify for the preference policy. The down-payment assistance could also open a door: "I would love to buy a house," she said.

After the basketball games, she drove home through neighborhoods she barely recognizes anymore. Still, she said, she wonders every day if she can find a way back.

"Every week or every other week, a new building or complex is coming, and I think about that," she said. "I wonder: What those are going for?"

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026